Month: December 2011

Massie is skeptical of the claim that "cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society":

This is superfically persuasive but upon a moment's reflection a nonsense. … [E]ven in Scotland it is possible to have onions, lettuce and tomato ready for picking at much the same time. Nor need you wait for winter to slaughter your cattle (and if you're making a lamb burger your spring lamb will be ready much earlier than that). Meanwhile, the flour you mill from your winter wheat will keep for months and, last I checked, making cheese and butter are not necessarily seasonal activities.

Eli Lake reports on how the US manages to get intelligence cooperation despite the crazy internal politics of our "ally" – by creating alternate pro-American institutions:

Within the [Inter Services Intelligence], America’s most reliable ally has been the spy service’s division known as the T Wing. It was created largely from scratch in 2006 and 2007, after the Americans mostly gave up trying to work with the ISI’s uncooperative leadership. U.S. officials say their hope was that the T Wing, which conducted [Younis al] Mauritani’s interrogation, might help to offset the pernicious influence of the ISI’s S Wing, the division in charge of managing the Pakistani government’s relationship with Islamic extremist groups such as the Kashmiri separatist Lashkar-e-Taiba and Afghanistan’s Taliban. According to the same officials, America also has embraced and funded units connected to Pakistan’s Interior Ministry, particularly in the corruption-ridden megalopolis of Karachi, where the local police are not considered reliable counterterrorism partners.

Frum, who calls Lake's reporting "amazing," takes on myths that he believes are threatening Pakistani democracy.

(Photo: Pakistani Islamists burn an effigy of US President Barack Obama during a protest in Lahore on December 2, 2011, against the cross-border NATO air strike on Pakistani troops. By Arif Ali/AFP/Getty Images.)

Pete Spiliakos spotlights it:

Some of Gingrich’s support is from people who think he is more consistently conservative than he really is.  His opponents are going to fix that.  Some of his support is a kind of deal-with-the-devil to support him because they think he is invincible.  But he isn’t ten foot tall.  He is going into the next debates with very high expectations, opponents who are sharpening the knives, and a boatload of vulnerabilities.  His position is far more fragile than his poll numbers would lead one to believe. 

Along the same lines, Weigel analyzes Ron Paul's attack ad against Gingrich, seen above. It's the first negative ad of the campaign airing on TV and a shortened version of the web ad we covered here.

Bruce Bartlett highlights the GOP ploy as a way to reemphasize the need for higher taxes on the rich:

Recognizing the intellectual and political weakness of their position, Republicans have responded that there is nothing to stop rich people from sending checks to the Treasury Department to reduce the debt. About $3 million is annually donated to the government for this purpose. On Oct. 12, Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, introduced legislation that would add a line on tax returns to make voluntary contributions to the Treasury. It was enthusiastically endorsed by the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist.

Reducing the deficit through voluntary contributions is not a serious idea. It would be a drop in the bucket, such contributions are not sustainable, and it would be unwise to have the government dependent on them because inevitably they would come with strings attached.

"Every political question I have ever known has had so much of the pro and con in it that nothing but the success could decide which proposition was to have been adopted," – Edmund Burke (via Wehner).

A reader writes:

Given your keen eye for the end of gay culture, I’m surprised you didn’t flag this passage from the article:

It's kind of sad, but many gay people are as close-minded about sports as some high-profile athletes are close-minded about homosexuality … Many gay people feel the need to compartmentalize people who aren't like them. So if you're politically conservative or you like sports, many gay people try to push you to the far corners of the community. They felt tormented by sports as children, so it's payback time now that they're adults.

I was drawn to this quote because it explains a lot of the attitudes I’m up against trying to sell what often feels like the majority of my gay friends on Boxer’s, one of the bars reviewed in the article.  I assume many folks have similar issues in other gay sports bars in other marketplaces. If often seems that what sustains "gay culture" – and what is even implicit in your countdown towards the end of it – is this generally inchoate sense that out there resides some form of gay behavior more irreducibly "authentic" and less affected than other forms. 

Now, I’m the type that tends to tune out anyone who starts lecturing me about "authenticity" (I have too many different identities myself, many working at cross purposes), but I also believe that the reality of gay culture is far more multi-variable: there are many gay cultures, and a large percentage of each such culture purports to claim itself as the most authentic manifestation of gay culture.  This is as true of club queens, as it is for bears, pomo queers, DL thugs, and the infinitesimal other gay cultures.  I have gay friends who literally will not associate with anybody who is visibly overweight. Conversely, I have gay friends who profess to not knowing a single word of Sondheim and who swam competitively in college.  Yet across the spectrum a lot of men seem to put their foot down at gay sports bars. 

I suspect that one of the reasons for this is that these types of settings, for many of the reasons outlined in this article, fail to validate for many gay men the same sense of mastery over their lives and identities offered by other more recognizably "gayed" institutions as theatre, culture, fitness, the arts, and the academy. Yet, what’s fascinating to me about places like Boxer’s and Nellie’s is how breezily judgment-free they are compared to most other gay bars.  Maybe it’s because the billowing football jerseys tend to desexualize the figures drowning underneath them.

But maybe there’s something else. Maybe there’s something about the testosteronal investment one puts into watching a favored sports team that perhaps neutralizes the vapid alpha male-ness that often permeates gay spaces in large cities (and, oh yes, I’m talking as much about The Eagle as I am about Rockit).  And maybe that’s the one simple irony of these settings: that too much play equals not enough game.  Just like how I imagine a lot of straight sports bars to be.

Another argues from the other direction:

I read about a bar where the gay male patrons are "indistinguishable from straight frat boys" with some concern. Straight frat boys are not typically the most tolerant people, and in my experience their gay counterparts – self-identified "straight acting" gay men – can be pretty nasty too.

Look, I get that there are gay guys who are naturally, unselfconsciously masculine in mannerisms, interests and attitudes. They're truly "indistinguishable" from straight men. Yay. I also believe that to gain acceptance for all gay people, the straights need to understand that we're not all stereotypes, and "straight acting" can accomplish that. BUT I also notice a disturbing trend among gay men of marginalizing and belittling fem men in public and on hookup apps like Grindr ("Don't be fem!" or "I like guys that act like guys.") I wonder if, with a taste of acceptance, the boys on the knife's edge of straightness – the ones who can "pass" – are seeking total acceptance within straight society by putting other gay men at a distance.

I often hear, "The only thing gay about me is that I'm attracted to guys sexually" and wonder what the implications of that statement are for gay people for whom that's *not* true. (I often wonder what the motive is for the guy who's saying it, and whether he actually believes it to be true or just wants to believe it.)  Again, being typically masculine is not a problem, necessarily, but not all of us are. With this "they're just like us" (or "we're just like you") talk, I fear we're just defining a smaller community of gay men to hate.

Or just maturing as a community that has as many nuances within it as it has enemies outside.

Never get between a porcupine and his pumpkin:

Friedersdorf thinks so:

It would seem worthwhile in the immediate aftermath of a Gingrich win. And then President Gingrich would take office, and proceed to behave like… well, a decades-long Washington insider who supported No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D, the attempt at a guest worker program, TARP, and the Harriet Miers nomination. Every conservative betrayal would be a reminder that the Tea Party helped elect just the sort of man they'd so righteously vowed to eschew.

The buzz around Barbara Walters' interview of Assad airing tonight has been focused on the following line from the dictator: "We don’t kill our people … no government in the world kills its people, unless it’s led by a crazy person." If you're interested in seeing Assad lie to your face and laugh about it, you can watch the above footage, though the Sky News segment on the plight of Homs posted here serves well as rebuttal. In terms of productive interviews, one can read a discussion with Burhan Ghalioun, leader of the opposition Syrian National Council. Maysaloon worries about the challenges of governance for Ghalioun after Assad:

Something has been bothering me for the past few days. Nobody seems to be interested in the shape of a post-Assad Syria. Outraged comments about Bourhan Ghalioun's promises to break ties with Iran and Hezbullah, or to negotiate a return to the Golan Heights, have drowned out any questions about how the Syrian National Council would address Syria's grinding economic and social issues. There is some mythical word, freedom, which is bandied about as if it would fix everything once we attain it. But Syria has many problems that will need to be addressed urgently. These are: A deficient, if not highly damaging, judicial and political system; endemic corruption, environmental degradation and desertification; poverty; a potential for an enormous crime wave once the regime collapses; and how they intend to build bridges across the communities and tribes that make up Syria's patchwork society.

Below, Assad's troops amuse themselves by plucking out a captive's moustache hair by hair:

These Aleppo residents yesterday didn't appear convinced by Assad's "man of peace" act:

Nor do these people in Hama, protesting two days ago:

Perhaps they've seen this extremely graphic video of what Homs has begun – a charnel house strewn with mangled bodies:

And yet these protestors in Daraa face a charge from Assad's thugs head-on:

Muncie, Indiana, 10.53 am